In the absence of any real dangers, Klaus decides to order antique mahogany from Avignon and to apply for the post of Master of the Arts at Mystic Falls High.

Charm, of course, is the key to everything.

"I'm sorry, sir," the principal says. "I'm gonna have to see your qualifications. To be honest with you, I have no idea why my secretary even gave you an interview."

He tilts his head at her. "I'm in a suit, sweetheart." He pauses. "I have a British accent."

("You have got to be fucking kidding me," Damon says, later, at the Grill, three shots down and counting. Alaric is passed out on the table. It's four in the afternoon on a Tuesday, after all.

"He did what?" Elena widens those doe eyes and shit, suddenly both Salvatores are suddenly thinking white picket fences and St Bernards.

Stefan's eyebrows go up and down, and everyone knows what that means. It's Forehead Brooding 101—thou eyebrows shalt speaketh for thee.

Caroline furrows her brow. "We have an art class?")

It's true though. They only go to History. On the first Wednesday of every month.

Ric needs his job, you know.

"You've gone mad." Rebekah tells Klaus, the night before his first class.

"A little positive reinforcement would be nice, Bekah, dear." He twirls. "What do you think?"

Rebekah is lounging on his bed and now the magazine drops from her hands. "You can't be serious."

"I think it looks good." Her brother says defensively. "It fits well, it's new, it's Gucci—"

"It's a fucking turtleneck." Rebekah snaps. "You can't go out in a fucking turtleneck. Next thing I know you'll start smoking and wearing berets and bringing your laptop to Starbucks so that everyone knows you're writing a god-awful novel—"

He pulls on a blazer and smiles for her. "How about now?"

She throws her magazine across the room. It goes through two walls and a window, and for Christ's sake, Klaus thinks angrily, that was mahogany.

Klaus shows a slideshow during his first lesson, and ends up screaming about post-modernism.

"I mean look at this!" He shouts, gesturing madly at the Gauguin on the screen. "This is ridiculous! No sense of style or line or form, what is pointillism anyway? What the fuck is the point of pointillism?"

("Oh my God," Elena says, mouth open.

Stefan has his head buried in his hands. "Why are we even here?")

"You know what, I'm glad he shot off his own ear." Klaus carries on. "I should have ripped it off for him. I shouldn't have listened to Rebekah and I should have ripped off that ginger fuck's ear. Look at this! Look at this shit! That is not how you paint."

("This is embarrassing." Damon says. "I can't believe we spent months trying to out-manoeuvre this guy."

Caroline nudges him with her foot. "What are you doing here?"

"What do you mean?"

"For God's sake." She says. "You look like a paedophile. Why are you always here?")

"If I see any of you using impasto in my class," Klaus points a finger at the trembling front row. "I will—"

"Pull out your spleen and shove it down your throat." The principal says, setting down the transcript. "Mr Mikaelson."

"It's an expression of polite displeasure." Klaus replies. Such a mess, these humans. Truthfully, he's forgotten how much he preferred vampires, who don't really flinch as much when you make these threats. These humans—a death threat or two and they call their incompetent police force; make such a big deal of everything. "From my country."

The principal lowers her glasses. "'I will pull out your spleen and shove it down your throat'—that's an expression from Britain."

The woman is on vervain, he realizes.

"Just this once, Nik!" Rebekah snarls twenty minutes later as she's shoving the woman's unconscious body into the back of a van. "I swear to God, if you make me do this again I'll burn your stupid house down—"

Klaus pays her no mind. He has a class next, after all.

("Where's Mrs Bradford?" The doppelganger asks him, voice taught with fear.

"She's been, ah," he pauses. "Temporarily misplaced.")

He goes home to find his remaining siblings sitting around in his living room. Kol, of course, is setting fire to one of his drawings.

"Niklaus," Elijah says. "This is an intervention."

"And the first step to recovery is to admit that you have a problem." Rebekah adds.

"That—" Elijah gestures to his outfit. "Is an abomination. I can't even contemplate what persuaded you to don that monstrosity."

"My hands are clean in this," Rebekah says, crossing her legs. "It's ridiculous; it's absolutely ridiculous, rather like your mid-life crisis over the doppelganger wench—"

"You bring shame to this family," Elijah raises his voice, talking over Rebekah's unfortunate reminder. "As forebears to the vampiric race, we are looked to to provide guidance—and how shall the younglings view us if they knew that one of the Originals is teaching schoolchildren how to finger paint? How would they react if they knew one of us is dressing like a faux-intellectual, elitist east coast Starbucks squatter? Have you given any thought to the consequences of your actions, Niklaus? Have you?"

"Long story short," Kol says, tossing the rest of his drawing—a rather fine representation of an Arabian mare, thank you—into the fireplace. "You look like a twat, Nik. Not gonna lie."

Rebekah shakes her head at him. "I killed a man in Chicago for wearing that very outfit."

"I—"

"First the hemp and now this," Kol shakes his head. "You're not in college, Nik; you're not reading the Communist Manifesto and experimenting with lesbianism, Nik. Honestly, sometimes I look at you and I cringe because you are embarrassing as fuck."

"I'm doing big things with the students!" Klaus shouts. "I'm changing their lives! I'm like Antonio Banderas in that dancing movie! I am changing lives with the power of learning!"

"I got a call this afternoon from Elena." Elijah says flatly. "Apparently you punched a student in the throat for using impasto and then stashed him in a cupboard."

"Do you think me so cruel, brother?" Klaus snarls. "It was the storage room."

A short silence, and then Kol says, "oh, for fuck's sake."

("You have to stop this." Rebekah says to the doppelganger bitch when she sees her at the Grill. "I don't care how you do it, I don't care who you rope into your stupid little gang to do it, just get my brother the hell out of your school."

"It's not that easy getting a thousand year old hybrid to stop teaching art class at a run-down public school, you know." Damon says from Elena's other side. Alaric is, once again, passed out on the table beside him. "Wow. Never thought I'd say that."

"Rebekah," Elena replies. "Look, we don't want him there any more than you do—"

"Do you know what he said to me the other night?" Rebekah hisses, leaning close. "Do you?"

"No," Elena whispers.

"He said, 'Bekah, turn the music down, I'm planning my course.'" Rebekah's hand tightens on the wood of the table, which is beginning to splinter. "'Turn down the music, I'm planning my course.' He told me to turn down my fucking music, so he could plan his stupid fucking course."

"Yeah, yeah, I think we got it." Damon says. "Like, the first two times, you know."

The wood snaps off clean in her hand. "So you see the problem." Rebekah snarls. "Get my brother out of that school, or I swear to god I will rip out your doppelganger throat. Got it?")

She's not sure when she became more threatening than her brother.

(Oh, wait, she does. It's when he started teaching art class at a fucking public school.)

"Not even a private institution," Elijah murmurs. "In which students are taught the finer details of using silverware, and learn Latin, but rather—"

Kol's nose is scrunched as looks around the room. "Holy shit. This place looks like a fucking retirement home."

(When the gang doesn't do things fast enough for Rebekah's taste, she kills a boy from Alaric's history class and leaves the body on the Salvatore's lawn.

Damon nudges the boy's femur with his booted foot. "Ever wonder how the neighbours don't notice shit like this?"

Elena is freaking out. Running her hands through her hair and all that. "We have to get him out of here!"

"Oh, who cares, no hurry." Damon replies, hauling the boy up onto his shoulder. "It's not like anyone notices around here. Two kids got ripped up bloody at the Decade Dance, if you recall."

Caroline furrows her brow. "Wait, the sixties or the twenties?"

Damon shrugs, "who cares?" He grins at two passer-by's on the road, waves a lazy hand. "Crazy party last night! This guy's shit-faced!"

They walk by without a second glance.

"Honestly though," Caroline says. "How is anyone still alive in this town?")

Rebekah hears the doppelganger's brother had beheaded one of her brother's hybrids on their front porch. She wonders this too.

"Nik, look!" She says brightly, a week after he got that fucking stupid job. She pulls a crying girl along with her into his office. "Look what I got you! I didn't even compel her! Go on! Fetch!"

He doesn't even look up. "What should we study for the second semester, Bekah? Abstractionism or should I just keep it in the Renaissance?"

"This can't keep happening." Elena says, watching Klaus scream at some girl who'd had the bad idea of painting the foreground before the back.

("I expressly said not to do that! Have you listened to a word I've said? Have you? I can't believe this trite rubbish—I said I wanted Raphael, not this! If I wanted Lucien Freud, I would have said so! I would have bloody well said—"

Klaus breaks off, looks across the room. There is a suspiciously vaginal depiction of a five-petal flower on his desk.

"I said no contemporaries!" He snarled. "Who in hell did Georgia O'Keefe?")

"You have to admit though," Damon replies. "Fear does in fact increase some of these kids' acumen, not that they're that bright to start with—you know one of your classmates asked me how to spell orange just before?"

"Why are we here, honestly?" Stefan says tightly. "We've been to every single one of these god-awful classes since he began, all the while his psycho sister's leaving bodies on my lawn—"

"Our lawn," Damon amends. "Okay? I don't see you mowing it."

"—my lawn, and I haven't eaten in days—"

"And the bunny population rejoices," Damon says snidely. "Jesus. I can't believe he hasn't noticed us at the back of his room yet."

(Katherine shows up two weeks into Klaus's little stint, lounging in the Salvatores' living room and displaying a distracting amount of cleavage.

"What the hell are you doing here?" Damon snarls. "I'm going to rip out your heart."

Katherine lifts an eyebrow. "Oh, is that what you're looking at? Nothing else?" She's sculling one of Damon's prized, thirty-year Scotches, and he thinks it's another reason to kill her. "Well, obviously, I'm here because my arch-nemesis is reduced to a faux-elitist hipster teaching those dumbasses at Mystic Falls High to paint. Did you see that turtleneck he was wearing the other day?"

She releases a breath. "I'm almost embarrassed I've been running from that guy for five hundred years.)

"Katerina's back in town!" Rebekah says brightly when she hears the news. She's lounging on Klaus's desk in a disturbingly short dress. "I'm thinking some vervain-soaked chains, some knives, a little upside-down hanging in the ballroom, just you and me, brother-sister bonding. How 'bout it?"

"Bekah dear," he says. "We're doing life drawing in a few days. Do you mind modelling?"

And that's how Rebekah ended up nude in front of a group of tittering high schoolers.

And fittingly of course, the event turns into a Mikaelson gathering.

("God," Caroline says, wrinkling her nose. "This family is so weird.")

"I will rip out your spleen and shove it down your throat," Rebekah says to her brother through a forced smile.

Klaus puts a hand over his heart. "Bekah, language. There are impressionable minds present."

"This is a disgrace to our family." Elijah says stoically, averting his eyes from Rebekah and her platform. "Seriously, this is like the incident in Columbia all over again. I was quite distressed when I heard of it."

Kol shrugs. Unlike his older brother, he doesn't bother averting his eyes. "I told him not to take the cocaine, didn't I? But no, no, don't listen to me. One moment we're enjoying the sun and local women, and then next thing you know we're surrounded by drug lords and a firing squad. It's why I stopped travelling with the two of them, you know."

(Damon wrinkles his nose. "Jesus. Why are her brothers here?"

Stefan tilts his head. "I forgot how great her boobs were."

Damon grins. "I didn't."

Elena crosses her arms, doesn't move when a few shoves turn into a quiet scuffle at the back of the room.)

Elijah gives up a month in, leaves town under the dark of night and for years afterwards, when asked about the occupation of his younger, all-powerful hybrid brother, denies his existence.

"Someone," he says, "has to preserve the reputation of our family."

Kol gets distracted. Something about how election season is the best time for sex scandals.

("Well, I suppose it could be worse." Elena shrugs. "I mean, he could be wreaking havoc and killing people and stuff, you know."

"He was." Stefan replies. "He kind of still is. The school had to take money out of its vervain fund to hire a therapist."

It doesn't turn out so well when they find out who the new therapist is.)

"If you can't beat him, join him," Rebekah shrugs when they show up in her office. "I've lived by that philosophy for a thousand years, you know."

She turns to the student sitting on her couch. "You need to stop being such a whinging little bitch and get over it, alright? Some of us have real problem to deal with."

The girl bursts into tears. Rebekah frowns, says, "Shoo."

Outside, Damon says, quite succinctly, "Well. Fuck."